EVELYN WAUGH STUDIES Vol

EVELYN WAUGH STUDIES Vol. 46, No. 3 Winter 2015 CONTENTS “He must have been a whole time job for you:” Condolences to Mrs. Waugh 2 J. V. Long Finding the Lush Place: Waugh’s Moral Vision in Scoop 13 Harrison Otis Evelyn Waugh: A Supplementary Checklist of Criticism 27 Joseph Tucker REVIEWS One Catamite after Another 33 The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me: An Aristocratic Family a High-Society Scandal and an Extraordinary Legacy, by Sofka Zinovieff. Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Manley War on Dullness 40 Renishaw Hall: The Story of the Sitwells, by Desmond Seward. Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Manley NEWS Evelyn Waugh Studies 2 “He must have been a whole time job for you:” Condolences to Mrs. Waugh J. V. Long When those we love are dead, our friends dread to mention them, though to us who are bereaved no subject would be so pleasant as their names. But we rarely understand how to treat our own sorrow or those of others. (Trollope 128) ThanaTech Update: Grieving online and sending condolences via e-mail have taken on a whole new meaning following the death of Princess Diana. To see a very interesting example of an opportunity to mourn via cyber space, visit the Online Memorial Service at www.royalnetwork.com [the site is defunct]. In addition to music and a review of her life and funeral, there are links to prayers that are suited for a variety of spiritual beliefs. (Sofka 204) In his fascinating study of the literature of correspondence, Yours Ever: People and their Letters, Thomas Mallon implicitly eulogizes the kind of compositions that have been all but obliterated by the efficiencies of email and texting: The small hardships of letter writing – having to think a moment longer before completing utterance; remaining in suspense while awaiting reply; having one’s urgent letters cross in the mail – are the things that enrich it, emotionally and rhetorically. (63) For biographers and scholars those “small hardships” have historically provided “literature’s supporting materials” (18). Access to a biographical subject’s letters is essential for information, for chronology, and for tone. In this essay, I propose that letters received – in this case the letters of condolence sent to Evelyn Waugh’s widow, Laura – are also a rich source in filling out a life under consideration. +++ In the summer of 2010 the British Library had almost finished anchoring the correspondence in the Evelyn Waugh Papers in large, permanent settings. However, one set of letters in the collection remained loose: the messages of condolence sent to Laura Waugh in the period immediately following her husband’s death on Easter Sunday, 1966. Though they were alphabetized, numbered, and the correspondents identified in pencil at the top of the page, in viewing them I felt almost that they should have been tied with a ribbon as a mark of their singularity and intimacy. The fact that they were at-large, mixed-up, yet together, reflected the confusion that attends the death of anyone we love. Death’s aftermath is a mess, and I imagined these letters to have been received, Evelyn Waugh Studies 3 appreciated and acknowledged, and then put away – perhaps a ribbon was engaged – for a later time when the feelings were less raw. (By August, 2011, they were no longer loose but, rather, carefully arranged in large albums, fixed to sheets that I am sure are designed to last the ages. They seemed like butterflies pinned for exhibition; the scholar in me was pleased; the romantic, less so.) This particular cache of letters is significant for two reasons. First, they complement Paula Byrne’s intuition, which she describes in the Preface to Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead: I set out to write this book because I believed that Evelyn Waugh had been persistently misrepresented as a snob and a curmudgeonly misanthropist. I did not recognize Waugh in the popular caricature of him. I wanted to get to the real Waugh, so I began asking questions such as ‘When and where was he happiest (and unhappiest)?’; ‘What were the relationships that mattered to him most?’, and ‘What was he looking for in life, and how did his quest shape his best novels?’ (Byrne ix) Waugh’s irascibility was an inescapable component of his personality. But the letters his widow received point to relationships and connections and exchanges with him which were warm, memorable, often funny, and not infrequently generous. And, secondly, these exchanges point to the inherently complex dynamic of the letter of condolence. Noel Coward addressed the issue in his own correspondence in March 1960: I was very distressed about Edwina’s [Mountbatten] death but, as you say, what an enviable way to go. The sadness, as always, is reserved for those who are left. In any case so many of my friends have upped and died during the last few years that I’m becoming sort of hardened to it. I start practically every letter now quite automatically with ‘Words are useless but please accept my deepest, etc.’ All I ask of my friends who are left is that they should live through dinner. (45-6) In a situation where the pressure on words themselves is so fierce, where words are liable to “fail,” how does a writer manage? A letter of condolence is a composition in which two vulnerabilities confront each other – the grief of the recipient and the anxiety, even fear, the writer encounters, at least implicitly, in the face of death. The rhetoric of bereavement occupies many forms, from the public reminiscences and solace offered in a conventional eulogy as part of a funeral service to the deeply private, sometimes excruciating, memories of loss that writers as different as Joan Didion Evelyn Waugh Studies 4 and Roland Barthes have published in recent years.1 The letter of condolence, in an effort to offer companionship with the grieving, employs ordinary language to approach the most private, inaccessible recesses of human experience. Barthes understands how words might be both revivifying and unwelcome at the same time and describes the complexity in his meditations on the death of his mother in Mourning Diary. Always (painfully) surprised to be able – finally – to live with my suffering, which means that it is literally endurable. But – no doubt – this is because I can more or less (in other words, with the feeling of not managing to do so) utter it, put it into words. My culture, my taste for writing gives me this apotropaic or integrative power: I integrate (enter into a whole – federate – socialize, communize, gregoriate), by language. My suffering is inexpressible but all the same utterable, speakable. The very fact that language affords me the word ‘intolerable’ immediately achieves a certain tolerance. (Barthes 175) One of the characteristics shared by a great many of the letters Mrs. Waugh received is a tendency to self-revelation on the part of the letter writer. The act of composition involved in writing a letter of condolence is difficult – “I don’t know what to say . .” – and there is a risk that the writer’s common sense gets distorted to the point where she simply might not know what she’s saying. Joan Didion’s generalization in The Year of Magical Thinking is exactly on point: “We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all” (198). I am suggesting that such exposure is a consequence of circumstances in which the writer might fear that “words are useless.” Indeed, Waugh’s own diaries and letters provide evidence that he was not immune to the pitfalls inherent in facing the pressures concomitant with attempting consolation. On January 2, 1954, the day after Duff Cooper’s death, Waugh wrote to the widow: 1 Father Philip Caraman preached the panegyric at Evelyn Waugh’s funeral. His sentences convey the right mixture and elevation of tones that remember accomplishment and virtue and aspiration but don’t ignore imperfection and certainly don’t harp on it. “The perfect craftsman must through your prayers be made the perfect man before he can join the company of Campion and Helena. Only the saints, as he wrote himself, have conformed completely in their lifetime to the will of God. He would expect everyone here, each in his own way and with integrity, to pray for his soul” (Rockett 333). Evelyn Waugh Studies 5 Dearest Diana All my poor prayers are for you and Duff. If there is any service anywhere that I can do, command it. If my company would be at all comforting, call for me. Believe in my true, deep love. Evelyn (Cooper 186) As Artemis Cooper glosses it, in The Letters of Evelyn Waugh and Diana Cooper, “Kind as it is, this letter did not touch Diana’s heart as it was meant to” (187). It is difficult to fathom Diana Cooper’s objections. The note reads like a haiku, and the authenticity of Waugh’s feeling seems palpable. Perhaps what the episode displays is the impermeability of grief – or the intractable nature of personality. In her biography of Waugh, Selina Hastings notes, “Nancy [Mitford] lacked Diana’s famous loveliness; but she lacked, too, Diana’s impenetrable carapace of self-regard, the thin, petulant whine of self-pity that so irritated Evelyn.” (524) Waugh’s diary entry three days later conveys some of the feelings the language of condolence camouflages.

Load more